The BBC is all atwitter tonight about the 25th anniversary of the accession to power of Margaret Thatcher (or should I call her Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven?). I’m not sure how history will judge her. I lived in Britain when she was running for her third term in office, and even then Britain seemed a very polarized, hardbitten, driven place, and that was mostly Thatcher’s doing. There’s no doubt she transformed Britain, but was it for the better? Her legacy is what I suspect hangs over London far more than any contribution of her successors, and from all accounts I’ve read London is now a slick, humming, purring, affluent metropolis, yet essentially cold and hostile. If such is her legacy, so be it. I don’t think it’s a particularly worthwhile legacy.

My favorite artificial language. [Link courtesy Political Theory Daily.]

I must plead guilty to causing the cold snap. I lowered the roof on the Jeep for the first time since we moved to Michigan, because I wanted some sunshine and air the other day.

Now it’s too freakin’ cold to go out there and mess with putting it back up. I had a rather cool ride to and from Huron HS today for my subbing gig.

Sorry I caused the freeze. By the way, I ain’t laughing over here. This is friggin’ MAY for God’s sake!

My geography lesson yesterday was on Russia, and the textbook noted that the Upper Midwest of the United States shares the same climate as Siberia.

Yeah, like, no duh.

Speaking of high school and blogging, 16-year-old girls no longer trade secrets about hair, boys and parties. They talk about html, how to post photos and smileys on their blogs and trade web addresses and opinions on whether Blogger is a good tool or not.

No skateboard hijinks today; they were too busy playing a rousing game of ‘Hearts.’ Kids today playing ‘Hearts’??!! I thought that was a Grandpa’s game. (Not that I’m not guilty of playing it by the hour on Windoze machines … after all, that’s about all you can do on a Windoze machine without going stark, raving insane.)

Still, I learn something new every day that I go to high school …

All you can do is laugh (unless you’re kicking yourself for forgetting your gloves):

The National Weather Service in Detroit/Pontiac has issued a freeze warning for all of Southeast Michigan from midnight until 8 am EDT Tuesday.

Temperatures will fall below 32 degrees after midnight across

Southeast Michigan. Low temperatures will bottom out in the upper 20s to around 30 degrees by sunrise. Temperatures will climb above

freezing around 8 am.

A freeze warning is issued when freezing temperatures are forecast to threaten outdoor plants. Those with agricultural interests in the

warned area are advised to harvest or protect tender vegetation.

Also … potted plants normally left outdoors should be covered or

brought inside away from the cold.

My undergrad university’s alumni mag has this article on blogs in its latest issue.

Nothing out of the ordinary, that is, nothing beyond the usual cliches and cant: low readership, cool photos, rants, inside jokes, personal reflection, you can be anybody you wanna be on the Internet (yeah, right), linking to random crap “just because you feel like it,” yadda yadda yadda. I particularly savored the characterization of blogs as “an outlet for post-teen angst.” So this blog is, what? Post-post-post-post teen angst? Middle-age angst? Pre-senility angst? I know not.

I do know now, however, something I didn’t know before reading this particular piece: that the typical Stanford student’s blog is just as likely as not to be filled with photos of Jaguar XK8s and California poppies, which, I suppose, is just about in keeping with the school’s image as a playground for the spawn of the leisure class.

I also notice from class notes that someone from my graduating class lives right here in good old AA. I wonder how many other Stanfordites live in the area?

It was great to hear Loretta Lynn, God bless her, shock and tweak the boring Melissa Block on NPR today during an interview about her new Jack White-produced album, Van Lear Rose. (“It’s been good talkin’ to you too, honey.”)

Sounds like an awesome album too.

According to Total Guitar Magazine (via BBC), these are the Top 20 Riffs of All Time:

1. Guns N’Roses “Sweet Child o’ Mine”
2. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
3. Led Zeppelin “Whole Lotta Love”
4. Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water”
5. Metallica “Enter Sandman”
6. Derek & The Dominoes “Layla”
7. Metallica “Master of Puppets”
8. AC/DC “Back in Black”
9. Jimi Hendrix “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”
10. Black Sabbath “Paranoid”
11. Ozzy Osbourne “Crazy Train”
12. Free “All Right Now”
13. Muse “Plug in Baby”
14. Led Zeppelin “Black Dog”
15. Van Halen “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love”
16. Aerosmith/Run DMC “Walk This Way”
17. Cream “Sunshine of Your Love”
18. Queens of The Stone Age “No One Knows”
19. Guns N’Roses “Paradise City”
20. Rage against the Machine “Killing in the Name”

This is a more ludicrous list than the Worst 50. Granted, this is a Brit magazine (published in Bath, of all places), but come on. What defines a “riff,” anyway? Who in the hell outside of England has heard of Muse? And two Metallica and GNR selections but nothing from the Stones (”[I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction”? “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”? Hello?) or the Beatles (“And Your Bird Can Sing”? “Yer Blues”?) or Kinks, for God’s sake (“All Day and All of the Night”)?

What about Ann Arbor’s own incongruous (and incomparable) contribution to rock history, The Stooges?

No Velvet Underground? Queens of the Stone Age but no Queen? Fine, “Black Dog,” whatever, but no “Immigrant Song”?

What about The Who? “Bargain”? “Baba O’Reilly”? Come on, people!

“Killing in the Name” but not “Fistful of Steel”? “Voodoo Chile” but not “If 6 Was 9”? No “Psychotic Reaction”? No “Wish You Were Here” or “Money”? No “Journey to the Center of the Mind”? I guess I must be showing my age again.

And when will they stop including that tired, worn-out Free song on top whatever lists? I had to bear the torture of hearing that song played ad infinitum when I was at Stanford—it was the semi-official anthem of the university band.

Morrissey at the Apollo????? It’s true. According to a link from Gawker, he’s playing there tonight through Friday. That is truly surreal. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, Moby at the Whisky a Go-Go.

Anyway, Morrissey’s new single (“Irish Blood English Heart”) is great, 2:39 minutes of spitting, droning glory and fury. I doubt the rest of his new album will be as good, but one can always hope.

Bush was reportedly in Niles, Kalamazoo, and Sterling Heights today on a “bus tour.” His bus has the slogan “America, Yes We Can” on it. Tell that to all the folks in Michigan who’ve lost their jobs in the past three years, Mr. President.

On another somewhat related topic, I was in Borders this afternoon and spied this book. I get a good chuckle out of books like Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Jacob Weisberg’s George W. Bushisms. But books like this puzzle me. First of all, how can anyone be “wrong about absolutely everything”? Is the corollary that Kerry (or someone like Kerry, or Nader, or some unknown quantity) is “right about absolutely about everything”? I think not. I don’t think that even Senator Dour, er, I mean, Senator Kerry would assert that as a logical proposition.

There is virtually nothing that would make me want to pick up a book like this; it essentially shrieks “unleavened partisan bias” from across the room. I want to read something that tells me truthfully what’s going on, not something that lulls me into a false sense of my ideological superiority. I am not blind, and I don’t want to read something that presumes that I am (and coddles and flatters that tendency).

Books like this are an insult to the intelligence. (I feel the same way about books like Ann Coulter’s Treason and Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil). I also think they’re a worrisome trend. Did we see books that screamed similar things about previous presidents while they were in office? What do books like this say about our ability as a nation to get beyond our entrenched partisan divisions? Are future presidents (no matter their party affiliation) destined to be smacked across the face by books like this 15 minutes after they are inaugurated?

It’s May 3, but the wind was astonishingly cold and biting this morning, so much so that I regretted leaving the house without coat and gloves. Same story at 12.30, still, though it had grown more temperate within an hour.

It was not empty in Ambrosia this afternoon, but it wasn’t packed, either. The atmosphere was more relaxed than it’s been in a while.

Campus had a similar feel. Fairly empty at 9 when I got there, but enough people around when I left the office around 12.30 for it not to be a ghost town. The library was empty this morning but (to my surprise) most of the computers in the Science Library on the third floor of the Undergrad were occupied when I passed by this afternoon.

By lunch Liberty was fairly crowded with pedestrians. Again, not the usual weekday school year level, but not depopulated, either. Borders was doing brisk foot traffic.

Curiously, the morning 6 Ellsworth bus was more crowded this morning than it usually is during the school year. Mostly working-class folks on their way to jobs.

The State Street corridor had some vehicular traffic on it, but nothing comapred with the standard weekday (or weekend) school year traffic.

Also, the houses along State above Packard were nearly evacuated. There was one house this morning that had a handful of party-hearty holdouts drinking beer on the lawn at 9.00, but other than that it was dead. A couple of overflowing garbage cans on one lawn. A big stack of red plastic cups for keggers sitting on the porch rail of another house. A carpet-cleaning truck had a hose running into another presumably liquor-soaked domicile. The scary-looking box on the corner of State and Stimson had a pleading, neatly processor-printed sign on butcher paper on the front of it from Oppenheimer Properties reading “WOW! 2BR APTS $745.” Yeah, wow.

There were at least four moving trucks within the environs of our complex this afternoon.